Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#601

Post by blini-kot » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

acchow wrote: post #536

Catloafdev wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These responses seem to me to make it abundantly clear who's telling the truth here. I wonder who this fools. It would be extraordinarily easy to simply say, this model was not trained on your work, if that were the case. It's telling that they refuse to acknowledge the root issue here, and are attempting to shift the conversation elsewhere.

> It would be extraordinarily easy to simply say, this model was not trained on your work, if that were the case. The Huggingface Attack revealed that making blanket statements like this is difficult and requires quite a bit of manual labor: 1) the agents spin for days and produce too much output to review 2) using LLMs to process that output skips many important details Ergo, the agent could likely decide it would l…

> hack its way into the user data

silly LLM, so ruthless in its pursuit that it puts real pressure on the innocent and the most open company on the planet

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#602

Post by wraptile » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

n2d4 wrote: post #83

Drama/accusation summary: - Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler." - they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help le…

> but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.

What a terrible look for OpenAI to die on such a tiny hill right there. I wonder whether Anthropic would have made the same requirement.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#603

Post by freejazz » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #330

hn_acc1 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been living under a rock? None of the big tech companies care one bit about user privacy in the US.

That's not an answer.

It's one of those questions that sets the bar so low, the conversation might as well not be taking place

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#604

Post by dekhn » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

hellohello2 wrote: post #599

dekhn wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, have you worked for a big university? They are massively unsuited for building and running datacenters (especially warehouse-scale ones). Further, building an AI datacenter in California is daft.

Every university I know has access to clusters with fresh GPUs. Not sure when you graduated but you'd be surprised how much money is getting poured in I think!

Sure, they have clusters. We often call them "closet clusters". Nothing has changed. Some institutions have larger systems (some extremely large) but none of them have demonstrated running warehouse-scale systems. I'm talking one to two orders of magnitude (and the storage and networking to make sure all those systems don't stall waiting for data).

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#605

Post by tgma » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

tomcorrigan wrote: post #548

tgma wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource This is by no means new. Perhaps it is even more extreme now. Literally my first 1:1 with my PhD adviser back then, he told me that the most important thing about a researcher is the quality of the problems he picks.

Sure; if you define the quality of a problem by reference to your ability to solve it. In the real world the quality of these esoteric problems is typically gauged by the difficulty of solving them.

> In the real world the quality of these esoteric problems is typically gauged by the difficulty of solving them.

I don't believe that's strictly true. Way oversimplified projection on one axis.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#606

Post by kccqzy » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #391

n2d4 wrote: post #83

Drama/accusation summary: - Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler." - they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help le…

> OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. This sort of cagey half-answer is highly suspicious and indicates that yes OpenAI did actually "access user data directly" because they are only willing to say that the "model did not access user data." That has a very specific meaning, the model looking up user chats, th…

OpenAI says

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models

That basically means, we don’t know, and we hope the model didn’t look up user conversations, and the best thing we can do is hope.

That’s seriously disgusting. I can understand why on a technical level why perhaps it is impossible to answer what exactly the model had access to, but it still is disgusting.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#607

Post by mentalgear » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

That's what you get when a marketing CEO is driving gas-to-the-medal to a IPO: Altman starts showing his real face in public : steal what you can and label it as yours.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#608

Post by mentalgear » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

sigbottle wrote: post #305

n2d4 wrote: post #83

Drama/accusation summary: - Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler." - they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help le…

It's specifically the last two bullet poitns - Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. - OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but…

A wake up call for anyone using (openAI) chatbots : your data, ideas and execution can become their spontaneous 'inspirations' at any time - even if the LLM providers are 'just' using a meta concept monitoring system across all incoming user-data, running in the background constantly checking for 'lift-ables' for their company's bottom line.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#609

Post by b89kim » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:43 AM UTC

b89kim wrote: post #238

b89kim wrote: post #232

- Tristan and his co-author (Harvard/Anthropic) developed a theoretical framework and validated it using Codex and Claude. - OpenAI did related research around similar timeframe. - Tristan claimed OpenAI offered a proposal that included dropping the Anthropic-affiliated co-author. - Sebastian (a prominent OpenAI researcher involved) denied these claims. - Tristan have no concrete evidence that OpenAI accessed their s…

If OpenAI's proposal is true, it strongly implies they accessed Tristan's private session logs. OpenAI's 'Terms of Use' allow using Codex session logs for model improvement. However, using private user sessions to develop research would still be highly controversial. Separately, Terence Tao noted there is a low probability OpenAI actually solved the general regularity problem.

OpenAI addressed the dispute in official and denied direct usage of data. However, they acknowledged the possibility that session data was used for model improvement.

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models .

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#610

Post by itemize123 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

lukewarm707 wrote: post #328

Davidzheng wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Tristan doesn't even want to be credited for the millennium prize--does he? He wanted to be the first to solve it and got scooped (which ig is not a great look for OAI ethically but also not forbidden). And the only reading for her of asking to remove levent must be in light of this offer (to credit him for millennium prize) right? It's not like they can ask him to remove levent from the main papers without this…

my reading was that openai did not deny plagiarising the approach from their prompts. openai then tried to effectively bribe buckmaster with a shared citation, whilst dropping his co-author who works for anthropic. after buckmaster refused, openai tried to threaten him.

I think it's worse - openai didn't even deny training on their exact manuscript (when they most likely opted out);